April 20, 2018
(Natural News) As hundreds of lawsuits against Monsanto for personal injury and wrongful death move forward, German pharmaceutical company Bayer has been given the green light to acquire Monsanto in a deal surpassing $60 billion. The mega monopoly merger was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice in April. Instead of breaking monopolies up, the U.S. encourages monopolies to merge with other monopolies, as the agriculture and pharmaceutical elite clamor for domination over the world’s food and drug supply. The merger follows in the footsteps of the Dow-DuPont and Syngenta-ChemChina mergers.
Monsanto and Bayer announced the merger in September 2016, claiming the deal will “boost agriculture research and innovation.” This only means there will be more genetic modifications made to plant life to accommodate new agrochemical inventions. Many farmers aren’t buying into it. During the 2016 and 2017 growing seasons, farmers across the United States have been plagued by dicamba drift. Millions of acres of U.S. crops were damaged in 2017 by a dicamba-based herbicide, manufactured by Monsanto and BASF SE. In order to maintain yields of the most profitable crops, farmers are trapped into growing only the genetically modified seeds that have been engineered to withstand the herbicides. This corporate takeover of agriculture has put many small family farms out of business, consolidating farmland into the hands of the few. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, America continues to do away with smaller farms in favor of larger farms. In 1987, larger farms representing at least 2000 acres, controlled 15 percent of U.S. cropland. In 2012, large farms controlled 36 percent of U.S. cropland. The choking out of small farms and biodiversity has continued since.
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